Civilisation is an agreement. We agree to pay our tax, obey the laws, and generally avoid berserking around the joint. Where these agreements breaks down you get riots that scale into civil wars, then collapse. That’s less of an issue so long as the problem is over there - so that when a culture soils the sheets you don’t have to deal with the stink.

But if there’s one lesson of the connected era, it’s that there is no more over there.

An interesting case in point recently surfaced on the website of Dan Tentler, a geek who - when he’s not flying drones across the San Diego skies - takes a peek at the various vulnerabilities of all of our connected devices. That’s like shooting fish in a barrel these days, because so many of these devices have such shoddy firmware and such poor default security settings they’re practically begging for someone like Dan to come along and take a look.